Tag: Balancing Selection

How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of Sub-Saharan African and non-African ancestry where the non-African parent has straight or wavy hair tend to have very curly hair. Therefore, one may say that the tightly curled hair form is dominant to straight or wavy hair. But, it is also the case that there is some modification in relation to the African parent in the offspring, so the dominance is not complete. When examining the morphology of the follicle, which determines the extent of the hair’s curl, the offspring may in fact exhibit some differences from both parents. In other words our perception of the outcomes of inheritance are contingent to some extent on our categorization of the traits as well as our specific focus along the developmental pathway.

Or consider the division between “traits” and “diseases.” The quotations are necessary. Lactose intolerance is probably one of the best cases to illustrate the gnarly normative obstructions which warp our perceptions. As a point of fact lactose intolerance is the ancestral human state, and numerically predominant. It is the “wild type.” Lactose tolerance is a relatively recent adaptation, found among a variety of West Eurasian and African populations. A more politically correct term, lactase persistence, probably better encapsulates the evolutionary history of the trait, which has shifted from the class of disease to that of genetic trait when we evaluate the bigger picture (obviously diseases are simply “bad” traits”).

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Gene Expression

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